HOW DOES VIRTUALIZATION IMPROVE DATACENTER OPERATIONS?

HOW DOES VIRTUALIZATION IMPROVE DATACENTER OPERATIONS?

WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY

HOW DOES VIRTUALIZATION IMPROVE DATACENTER OPERATIONS?

HOW DOES VIRTUALIZATION IMPROVE DATACENTER OPERATIONS?
The traditional datacenter model is something with which most of those in the information technology (I.T.) field are familiar. There are many types of physical servers, each one having a single operating system installed and typically performing a singular function, such as hosting a web site’s database, providing network services like Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP), or an enterprise function like email. If a new service is needed, a new server must be purchased or a decommissioned server must be upgraded, physically installed in the datacenter, then an operating system must be installed and finally the requested application or service must be loaded and configured. This process could take anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on the complexity of the requirements (VMware, 2009). Additionally, in the case of a distributed application, there would be a central database in which the database information from each site, the application server from each site, and the desktop applications installed locally on each workstation would be consolidated (Sgallari, 2009). One must also take the infrastructure costs associated with this datacenter into consideration, such as electricity, cooling, floor space, and hardware maintenance on all of this equipment.
The above model is highly inefficient for several reasons, including hardware procurement and maintenance, software licensing and licensing renewal fees, and increased utilities cost. Datacenter virtualization helps to increase the efficiency of the datacenter by reducing the number of physical servers required, decreasing the amount of upgrade or maintenance time needed, lowering the cost of utilities, and decreasing the physical footprint the datacenter requires (VMware, 2009). The administrative burden on the I.T. staff and system administrators are reduced. Most virtualization solutions have tools available that will allow the systems administrator to update all virtual machines on a physical host simultaneously versus
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HOW DOES VIRTUALIZATION IMPROVE DATACENTER OPERATIONS?

manually updating each server in the datacenter in a traditional configuration. Virtualization also allows systems administrators to deploy a new server in a matter of hours, whereas it could several days or weeks to deploy a physical server (Ullman, 2009). Additionally, disaster recovery and continuity or operations are also improved with datacenter virtualization. This is primarily due to new virtualization techniques such as High Availability (HA), whereby if a virtual machine crashes, it is automatically restarted on the same physical host; similarly, if a physical host crashes, the virtual machines it hosted are automatically migrated to a new physical host and restarted (Whitehouse, 2011). This data suggests that virtualization is beneficial because it reduces infrastructure cost, lowers the administrative burden on the I.T. professional, and improves the continuity of operations and disaster recovery.
Datacenter virtualization reduces infrastructure costs by lowering hardware costs, curtailing maintenance expenses, decreasing the amount of power required for the datacenter, and reducing the cooling requirements for the datacenter. Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server. The virtual machines are controlled by a hypervisor, which is a lightweight operating system installed on the physical server. By consolidating servers in such a manner, the total number of physical servers required in the datacenter is reduced (Cardwell, 2007). Additionally, as a result of the consolidation, there are fewer physical servers which require